Appletree Answering Service

The common goal for Sales and Marketing is to identify the best prospects and then connect quickly. A recent MIT study shows that if you can catch someone within 5 minutes after they fill out a web-to-lead form, you are 80% more likely to connect with them. If you wait 30 minutes, that likelihood drops to 10%.  Below is a summary of results from a survey by Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and a study by Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT, on the topic of Lead Response Management.Kellogg Lead Response Management Survey Overview

By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor of TMCnet.com

Strong partnerships based on excellent, caring, service pays off. Just ask the American Red Cross (ARC) of the Delmarva Peninsula — which serves over 1 million people in Delaware and six counties on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — and teleservices firm Appletree Answering Service.  The ARC has renewed its customer care partnership with Appletree Answers: a relationship that began back in 2000, whose longevity, observers say, is rare in teleservices.

The ARC offers assistance 7/24 to local families when disaster strikes. In 2007-2008 it provided emergency disaster relief after 198 fires, floods and other disasters and offered comfort and emergency needs to 295 families in crisis. The organization teaches lifesaving skills such as first aid, CPR and water safety and disaster preparation training. Over 20,000 people were trained on lifesaving while over 10,000 received disaster education in 2007-2008.

The Red Cross Lifeline program is another invaluable service the local chapter provides. Lifeline, which is a personal emergency response system, offers independence to seniors and other vulnerable people while giving peace of mind to their family and friends. More than 450 seniors and other vulnerable citizens became subscribers between 2007 and 2008.

In addition the ARC chapter helps local military families communicate during emergencies, such as when a family member needs to reach their relative in the military such as a death in the family, severe accident, or illness.  In 2007-2008 it delivered 1,000 emergency communications messages and other direct services to/for active duty, Reservist and National Guard personnel and their families. The Delmarva Peninsula is home to Dover AFB in Dover, Del. the state capital. This air force base is home to the 436th and 512th Airlift Wings which carries personnel, materiel, cargo, and sadly, the remains of those who died in the service of their country.

Appletree Answering Service provides ARC with customer care for all of these services and more, including card activation calls (when a victim is need of funds, the ARC gives them a card for use and it handles the activation) and media inquiries. It has 49 call center agents who handle their calls. Each agent assigned to them is individually trained on the account by a manager or supervisor. 

The firm says its value to the ARC is the ability to demonstrate empathy with very difficult calls: people who have lost their homes in a fire or parents calling for their children in the military to report a death. The call center agents accurately take the necessary information needed and efficiently provide it to the on-call caseworker for the American Red Cross.
“The reputation of the American Red Cross of the Delmarva Peninsula has been built over the past 100 years through caring and concern for those individuals in crisis,” states Daniel Valle, CEO, American Red Cross of the Delmarva Peninsula. “Many people don’t realize the multitude of services we offer until they are in need. To ensure the highest quality customer support for our community after-hours we rely on our dedicated partners at Appletree Answers to be the friendly, helpful, and empathetic voice available 24/7.”

“Our work with the American Red Cross is more than a business to business arrangement,” added John Ratliff, founder and CEO of Appletree Answers. “We consider the Red Cross a strategic partner and are honored to be trusted by an organization where every call is critical.”

Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor.

If you have ever: Ordered from a catalog, purchased a concert ticket or  called to complain about an order or product , then you have interacted with a “Call Center”!  Of course, Appletree operates multiple call centers around the USA, however, our activities extend well beyond the handling of your calls. 

In addition to handling your tele-communication needs, Appletree offers a full solution menu which includes project support needs.   By eliminating your long distance phone charges and alleviating your staffing needs, Appletree will save your company significant time and money. 

Flexibility and quick response to our clients’ changing needs set us apart in the call center industry.  Whether your needs are re-occurring or singular projects, let Appletree accommodate your communication needs in the following ways: 

• Schedule, Cancel, or Confirm Appointments
• Customer Service follow-up calls
• Application Processing
• Customer Surveying
• Event and Conference Registration
• Ecommerce – Order Taking/Order Processing
• Cross Sell and Up-Sell Programs
• Live Web Chat
• 24-Hour Help Desk/Technical Support 

Whatever your company’s needs are, Appletree’s comprehensive corporate capabilities are available, accessible and affordable. Contact an Account Specialist today at 800-237-2810 to discuss any of your project needs.

20 times return on investment in less than a year; record retention of customers in a commodity business during a severe downturn; highest morale in the history of the company; and the best two quarters, ever, in terms of profitability. The key? An initiative called “Dream On.”

“You’re either a giver or taker,” explains John Ratliff, founder and CEO AppleTree Answering Service, a 350 employee inbound call center company based in Wilmington, Delaware with call centers in 12 locations throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico. “Givers tend to get stuff back while takers fight for every last nickel and they are always the ones, in the end, who are struggling - they never have abundance.”

Huge Problem

The transformation of Ratliff’s 13 year-old firm began during a quarterly offsite as the company prepared its plan for the coming 3rd quarter of 2008. “Employee attrition was the ‘critical number’ we chose to focus on,” recalls Ratliff. “We were running an industry average 95% turnover of our frontline employees while our non-exempt turnover was just 3% — clearly we were doing something right for one group but not the other - and just being average has never been our goal.”

Ratliff knew that the company’s growth, through 13 acquisitions in six years, had made it impossible to create a cohesive culture. And he had a nagging feeling that Appletree needed to be more than just a place for his employees to come to work. What he didn’t realize was how painfully out of touch he and his executive team had become with their frontline employees.

“We were in our planning session brainstorming ways to create a better experience for our employees when Lisa Phillips, our director of operations, asked how we could become more like ‘Make a Wish’ for our employees,” notes Ratliff. Over the years, Appletree has generously donated to charities and the “Make a Wish” foundation had always been their favorite.

Human Solution

So they put together a small team of people to flesh out the idea and decided it wasn’t about identifying their hard luck employees. Instead they simply wanted to know one thing, in a perfect world, that each of their employees would like to have happen in their personal lives. Critical to the request - there were no restrictions or caveats. And final decisions would be made by a secret committee.

Dreams

Titled “Dream On”, they announced it on their intranet and supported it with printed collateral and posters in all of their offices. Not surprisingly, like most new initiatives, the responses were slow to come in, but the requests that did trickle in began to provide the executive team a glimpse into the lives of their people.

“It was nothing short of shocking to discover the situation of our frontline employees,” remembers Ratliff. “Just like you do demographic research on your customers, we started to really get an insight into the challenges of our employees and the kinds of situations they had inherited.”

Dream Requests

Health was a staggering shocker for the executive team as well as challenges caring for an elderly parent or grandparent. Others found themselves caught on a financial treadmill, having been out of work for a couple months before joining Appletree and needing a couple thousand dollars to get caught up.

“And I was surprised by the car situation - how a change in a bus route can force our employees to change jobs or how a previous employer may have changed job hours which no longer matched public transportation schedules,” explains Ratliff. Seventeen employees simply wished to own a car.

Living in a car

“One of the first requests we got was from a manager of one of our employees,” recalls Ratliff. Through a perfect storm of events, including the employee’s husband getting in a pretty serious accident and losing his job, the couple and their child found themselves living in a car, unbeknownst to Ratliff and his executive team. So the company put up the deposit money and worked with a landlord to get her a decent lease. They also provided furniture and gift cards to help the family get back on their feet.

“We meant to do this privately but the employee let a lot of people know and soon it was on our intranet and that dramatically increased submissions,” adds Ratliff.

Contact

The company intranet has been a powerful vehicle for linking their employees across 12 sites and creating a sense of community, witnessed by the companywide assistance that poured in when Hurricane Gustav hit Houma, location of one of their call centers. Employees stepped up to the plate and shipped clothes, food, and other necessities within 48 hours to their fellow employees. “It was an instant injection of positive to our culture.”

Access

Helping eight people with living situations like bills and rent; sending two employees on their first honeymoons leveraging Amex points; flying a mom over Christmas to see her daughter in the Navy; providing four employees with personal computers at home; and fulfilling the dream of a 90 year old employee to take her first family vacation with her mentally challenged daughter are just some of the dreams they’ve made come true.

Sick

“What CEOs don’t realize is the access you have that other people don’t and how you can create opportunities for people you never would have thought of,” reflects Ratliff. This was driven home when one of Ratliff’s employees, who had been with him from the beginning of the company, asked for help in sending her 28 year old husband, who is suffering from stage 4 Hodgkins disease, to an Eagles football game.

Through connections Ratliff had, the team picked him up in a limo, brought him down to the field and sat him in the wives section for the game. After the game each player came out of the locker room, greeted him, and signed a game ball, including his favorite player who took his game shirt out of his duffle bag, signed it, and asked him to walk him to his car.

“This cost me zero dollars - just some time to access my network,” notes Ratliff. “It’s not about throwing money at problems.”

Results

In turn, the company has had its best six months ever. First, turnover dropped instantly once “Dream On” was launched, where today it sits around 30%. At a cost of $5k to replace an employee, there’s already been a net $1 million contribution from a program that has cost $50,000 so far. And for the cynics that would say the terrible economy would have driven this rate down anyway, customer turnover, which should have been high, is also the lowest in history due to a highly engaged and upbeat workforce. And all of this has resulted in the two most profitable quarters in Appletree history!

“The overall sense of belonging - of being something bigger than themselves or their individual sites - and part of a community has been the biggest change I’ve seen among the employees,” concludes Ratliff. “And for me, I feel more connected, now, to our entire group, and the company has become much more human to people.”

Verne Harnish

Appletree Answers is excited to announce that we are now offering online bill pay.  Our customers will have the ability to pay their bills via credit or debit transactions with Visa, Mastercard, AMEX and Discover! 

Feel confident that your payment will post to your account within one business day.  Simplify the invoicing process and schedule your payments ahead of time.  Eliminate mail delays and never again pay late fees! Manage your businesses from a tax perspective by printing out an instant payment receipt, as well as, receive payment confirmations via email.

Thinking green, Appletree is moving full steam ahead to provide as many green transactions/interactions with our customers…  In addition, we are encouraging our customers to not only use the on-line bill pay feature, but reach out to get your newsletters and invoicing emailed to you.  Together we can partner to make our planet more green.

Beginning February 23rd, 2009, go to https://www.appletreeanswers.com/secure/billpay.php, it’s fast and secure!

When it comes to Customer Service, our front line agents take the prize.  Here at Appletree we are very proud of the product our agents deliver to our Customers and their Customers.  Managing the efforts of our front line staff is an elite group of individuals we refer to as our Team Leaders.  The Team Leaders’ job is to educate, hold accountable and cultivate our front line agents.

The week of January 5^th, Appletree brought in 30 Team Leaders from all of our 12 sites for an aggressive training, tour of the Corporate Office and Management Presentation sessions.  The focus was to drive home the value our Team Leaders add to the organization, while giving them additional tools to do their jobs.  John Ratliff, CEO states, “The number one way to create a culture and pass down the company’s DNA to our front line agent is to empower the people that manage their efforts.”

Several modules were developed in an effort to support and educate our Team Leaders.  Human Resources and Employee Fulfillment Directors presented on many topics to share risks, techniques and legal regulations associated with managing people.  Information Technology Directors presented on the do’s/don’ts with our systems and the Q and A session was valuable as our managers began to share best demonstrated practices.  With the recent roll out of Salesforce (our Customer management tool), our Team Leaders were granted access to the system with a very detailed process to assist with consistent documentation and Customer Service.

The bulk of the time was spent with the Operations Directors, who focused on industry specific education.  Opening the lines of communication and introducing this level of management to one another to help with overflow traffic, sharing of resources and training techniques on difficult accounts. 

The investment back to the company and the service expectations that our Customers can expect from this experience are simply put, worth it!  Measuring employee turnover, Customer attrition and quality will be the tangible evaluation and reward.

Appletree has taken a multi-lateral approach in communicating the importance of our Customer data. 

1. Company Insight:  As an answering service, we act as an extension of your business.  If we don’t properly emulate your business, then we are not successfully servicing your customers.  Our Service Managers are constantly asking you for information about your company: FAQ’s, directions, services offered, hours of operation, etc. in an effort to represent you transparently to your customers 
2. Customer Contact Information:  Contacting the right person in your organization is important to us.  For example, if we have a billing question, we want to talk to the appropriate person.  In order to adequately do this, we need to ensure we have correct email addresses, points of contact and phone numbers.  This will allow us to reach you at a moments notice, in the event of an emergency.
3. On Call Directories:  Having correct and up to date on-call information for your employees lets us assist your customers quickly and accurately.  Always contacting the appropriate on-call employee improves the caller’s (your customer’s) perception of your business.  We understand the importance of being in a 24/7 business and real-time information allows us to contact the appropriate employee for that middle of the night emergency call.

Appletree has taken strides to provide our Customers and Employees with the tools necessary to improve the overall experience.  With the implementation of our CRM SalesForce this year, our Employees are working hard to update our Customers company and contact information.  This resource has been a tremendous help in communicating with our Customers.  Proactive campaigns are aiding us in obtaining more detail about our Customers needs, products and concerns.  In the coming months, you will be receiving information cards that we would like for you to complete and return.  Remember, the more information you provide us, the better armed we are to serve you and your Customers.  Finally, we have implemented technology enhancements that allow most of our Customers the ability to check and change their on-call schedules 24/7 via the web from anywhere you have internet access.  For those locations that do not have this capability yet, we are working very hard to ensure we have similar systems in place and the directories are loaded in real time and with the most accurate of schedules.

With growth comes responsibility.  And with an intense focus to deliver exceptional service, Appletree has restructured our Company Core Values.  Our Mission Statement, “Enhancing the lives of our Customers and Employees one interaction at a time”, demonstrates the overall commitment we are striving for; our core values help us define how we are going to deliver on that commitment. 

•   Employees are Critical

•   Think like a Customer

•   Integrity Matters

•   Small Details are Huge

•   Be Quick, But Don’t Hurry

•   Take Care of Each Other

With 12 sites and 350 employees, the deployment of our Core Values had to be perfect.  We created small laminated pocket cards that included our Mission Statement and Core Values, and were distributed to all of our employees.  John Ratliff, CEO of Appletree, recorded a video that was posted on Youtube.com defining the value and importance of a company standing for something and getting behind a common goal.  Finally, we posted descriptions of our Core Values on our internal Intranet to help the employees understand at a detailed level why we chose the Values that we did.

There are a multitude of efforts being put forth this year to build an organization that strives for excellence.  Education programs, people development, benefit and recognition programs, as well as personal interest programs such as Dream On, are a just a few.  Appletree believes that building a family of employees who have the knowledge and tools to do their jobs well will create an environment that is ready to deliver that exceptional experience.

For those of you who are sports fans, this story may peek your interest, but I will not give you the blow by blow recant of the game.  Stay with me, I promise it’s going somewhere. 

So last night, I was lucky enough to get 2 club box tickets to the Philadelphia Flyers vs. Dallas Stars game, with a premier parking pass.  We had exceptional seats, about 12 rows off of center ice; access to the club box bar and close proximity to a restroom, which seems small, but quite the luxury at a crowded sporting event.  The game proved to be exciting clear through the 3^rd period where the Flyers pulled out a 4 -3 win over the Stars, giving them their 5^th win in a row.  With all the commotion of an exciting win and masses of people exiting the stadium, my friend and I went out the wrong exit.  So much for a premier parking pass…  And to add to it, it was raining, hard!  Taking advantage of the situation, we decided to run through the parking lot, jumping in rain puddles, splashing each other and racing through the parked cars like an obstacle coarse.  It was freezing cold and we were soaked, but it was fun.  Fun that you see children having, carefree, easy fun and it was all stimulated by a mistake.  When I woke up this morning, I was excited to share my story.  If it made me take the time to reflect on the simplicity and smile, then maybe it would touch someone else.  I guess the moral of the story is, not to let mistakes get you down, don’t dwell on them.  Get through them, learn from them and make the most of the situation! 

We are all affected in some way by the current economic slowdown.  The key to success is managing through these tough times with minimal strategic impact.  Companies lay off workers, cut back on resources, reduce wages and freeze benefits.  General anxiety leads millions of companies to hunker down and stop spending, which slows the economy even more.  However, your business does not have to suffer during these hard times.  During times like these, there are still several ways for companies to thrive and continue to grow their business.  Below are some tips from experts on how to save money and still grow your business during an economic downfall.  Along with some suggestions on how Appletree can help. 

Get your Finances in Order
It’s important to keep your business costs low and maintain cash flow.  Save money on jobs by eliminating non-profitable areas and outsourcing in order to use money where you need it the most. 

As your receptionist, you don’t have to pay Appletree a salary, benefits, sick and vacation days, taxes, or workman’s comp.  You don’t have the expenses of office space and you only pay us for service when the phone rings.  Appletree provides significant bottom line savings in comparison to full time employees.   

Keep your Staff Happy
During down times, management needs to place absolute focus on the core business.  Take care of the people that are going to carry your business through this tough time. 

In order to avoid hindering your employee’s productivity, Appletree can help your employees focus on their jobs and fulfilling their responsibilities.  By screening their phone calls, we can transfer their urgent calls and relay the messages for the others.  In addition to taking calls, Appletree can also answer your employee’s emails around the clock. 

Increase the frequency of communications with existing clients
Another key element for thriving during a recession is to focus more on customer satisfaction.  By focusing on delivering more than you promise, you are putting the customer first.  This helps reinforce their decision to buy from you.  Personalized attention makes your callers not only feel important, but also makes your company stand out.

Appletree will address client concerns, take orders, and answer their questions one-by-one, all while providing you with 24/7 customer support. With Appletree, you can increase your productivity, while still providing your clients with the personal attention they deserve.

Invest in Your Business
Promote, promote, promote!  Look at effective ways to market your business. When people are ready to buy, they want to talk to someone now.  To get an answering machine or voice mail gives them no sense that they have made any contact at all with your company.  Many feel that if they cannot reach someone when they are ready to buy, surely they may not reach anyone when they have a problem. 

An answering service can give your callers the impression of stability and professionalism that they look for in a company they want to do business with.  Appletree will always be there to answer their calls and can help you generate new business by making outbound phone calls or fielding and screening your incoming sales calls.  Your image starts with the person who answers your phone.  Show your prospects that you are a customer service oriented company.  With Appletree, all of your calls are handled with accuracy and expediency.